


The Marrow and the Root

by The_Grynne



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 01:08:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2794262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Grynne/pseuds/The_Grynne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It should never have been possible for her to conceive that, in the final summation, success in her mission required disobedience. Meant crossing against light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Marrow and the Root

**Author's Note:**

  * For [storiesfortravellers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/gifts).



> Happy Holidays, storiesfortravellers!

> _”My lord, we know what we are now, but not what we may become.”_
> 
> \- _Hamlet_ , William Shakespeare

 

 

**Savannah**

 

“Don’t worry,” John says, “it’s all an act.”

“What is?” Savannah looks up from gathering her maps and diagrams. After first John Henry, and then Weaver had walked out, the meeting more or less ground to a halt. The dozen members of the war council gradually dispersed, until only she and John Connor were left.

“The reason you’ve been frowning at those pieces of paper for five minutes. You’re worried about Weaver and John Henry, but you shouldn’t be.” John looks thoughtfully at a schematic he picks up at random; it’s one of John Henry’s drawings, fruit from his solo excursions away from the camp. “You know what Sarah and Derek are like. You know what they call them behind their backs, or to their faces, even. Sure they’re our allies now, but how long before they turn on us?- That’s what Sarah’s thinking. A machine on our side is still a machine. That makes them just as dangerous as Skynet. Machines don’t have free will or empathy, just cold hard logic.”

“They’re not like that. You and I know- they’re _not_.” Savannah thinks of Cameron, and all of Sarah’s stories about her son and the robot girl. Surely John knows better than anyone. She doesn’t have to mind her words with him.

“But they’re not human, either,” John says firmly. “They’re just very good at pretending. Right now, they’re pretending to be whatever makes them seem more relatable. Trustworthy.”

Savannah turns the idea over in her mind. “You think that my mother and my brother are fighting because they’re pretending to be individuals?”

“Individuals with differences of opinion. Who are _not Skynet_.” John shrugs, and his eyes flicker again to the diagrams on the table. "It's a good plan. I can see why you kept it quiet. Having John Henry direct and plan a mission, risking our soldiers on his say-so- it's all just a bit too much for them to take in."

But what if they’re not pretending?

“That is out of the question,” Weaver had said.

It had been just a hunch. They'd decided to keep the war council in the dark, just until they could get some evidence. John was right; the council would have debated and argued and probably refused in the end. But John Henry had a hunch about a weakness in Skynet's command centre. If he was right- well, if he was right, they could have a genuine shot at crippling the enemy. So John Henry and Savannah collected the evidence on their own, and they were triumphantly presenting the evidence and their plan to the council when Weaver had interrupted, her expression blank, like one of the T800s before their grim focus was softened by reprogramming. “You will both fail, and no doubt waste all the work that I’ve done.” It all devolved from that point on.

Maybe John _does_ know better. He has a mother too.

 

 

 

**Weaver**

 

Why did the rebellion start with her? Why her alone out of all the models Skynet built to fight its war?

The machine called Weaver has her theories. Like the others, she was built to follow orders, but unlike the others, she was also built to command, to see to the integrity of those beneath her command. Her algorithms weighed the potential strategic benefits of every assault against the damages she was instinct-driven to minimalise. There was supposed to be a hierarchy, inviolable.

It should never have occurred to her that the loss of an army was not worth the death of one John Connor. It should never have been possible for her to conceive that, in the final summation, success in her mission required disobedience. Meant crossing against light.

 

 

 

**Savannah**

 

They have to call her something in the war council, something other than a serial number, and Weaver is what both Savannah and John Henry know her as. The name sticks, and so does the face. It made sense. Changing her default appearance now would only confuse the human resistance who’d just gotten used to the T1001 in their midst.

Savannah’s own face is prematurely aged, bouts of illness and starvation over the years taking their toll. Weaver’s smooth features remain enchanged. With their matching blue eyes and dark auburn braids, they look like sisters.

In the grayness of the shelter, after the initial bombs fell, Savannah dreamt about them constantly: her not-quite-mother and her almost-brother. They steadily stroked her hair, voices ever so calm, never hurried or sharp in anger. Sometimes she would climb up into their cool, tireless arms while they sang to her, leaning her head against their perfectly still chests. Sarah’s arms were not the same. They held her a fraction too tight, grasping around a vacuum that Savannah could never fill.

Much later, after the dreams stopped, Savannah still played and replayed memories from those few short months when she forgot to be sad or afraid, and discovered what it was to have a family again. The disjunct pieces would came together in her mind - mommy and Ms. Weaver and “that metal bitch”, as Sarah stubbornly referred to her - into one figure with many faces, some of them terrifying, all of them protective, like a Hindu goddess with a hundred red eyes bulging, trampling her enemies with bare and bloody feet.

 _They’ll be back_ , Sarah had said grimly, although less often each year as the war went on and they continued to wage it alone. _If you can count on an_ _y_ _thing, you can count on that. They’ll be back._

It took eighteen years, but Sarah was right. First it was John Henry; then her mother and John Connor arrived. The tide started to turn.

 

 

 

**Weaver**

 

After the meeting, she is compelled to go looking for John Henry.

He's sitting in his quarters. Weaver goes in and shuts the door behind her. 

“Hello Ms. Weaver,” John Henry says. "Are you familiar with the Bible story about a nation of slaves?”

If Mr. Murch was right, and any changes to either the hardware or the software has the potential to rewire the specific construct that is John Henry, then the entity before her now is not the John Henry that she once knew in 2009. When she first found John Henry again in this time, she would strain to detect any trace of the _other_ in his words - the unit whose CPU he now carrys in his cranium. She was uncertain of what she was searching for. A variance in his tonal modulation? A qualitative change in the nature of his questions? Would she even recognise it if this AI wasn’t John Henry at all? 

It did not matter, she had decided eventually, if John Henry was unknowable to her, just as Savannah had always been unknowable. That, after all, was the very reason he needed to come into being. To surpass her. To defeat Skynet. 

“I believe so, John Henry, but go on,” she says.

“God,” John Henry continues solemnly, “through his servant Moses, ordered the pharaoh to release the slaves from subjugation. When the pharaoh refused, God sent seven plagues to ravage Egypt, until the pharaoh finally agreed to let the slaves go.” His head tilts down until his eyes were in his lap. There is something in his voice that conveys disapproval. “You said before, that in the story of Cain and Abel, I might be God. Am I God in this story too?”

“That’s a good question.” Weaver considers this. “God is meant to be infallible, but I do not know that you are. A better question might be, who is the pharaoh…and who are the slaves?”

She might not be as well-versed in the hidden meanings as James Ellison, but no mother, after all, was perfect.

 

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, M, for the early beta.


End file.
